Worksheet: Elections and Voter Turnout

1. Who were the candidates for governor in your state (or state of choice) during the last election? Identify their political party affiliation. Who won the election? Governor Jerry Brown –D and Neel Kashkari -R

Governor Jerry Brown won his fourth term in 2014, he did so out of a field of 14 candidates.

2. What were the gubernatorial candidates’ platforms?

Gov. Brown ran on a platform of wanting to complete the work he began. That included reducing the state's debt, improving the state's credit rating and protecting the funding of education and public safety. He campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility, citing his past work at creating a so-called rainy day fund. Brown's chief Republican challenger Neel Kashkari, a former George W. Bush Treasury Department Aid and a former Wall Street Banker, ran on a platform that Brown was out of touch with voters. That despite all of Brown's accomplishments, companies like Tesla chose to put jobs in Nevada, rather than California where the electric car was developed. He spent a week in a homeless camp in Fresno, eating at shelters and sleeping in parks to underscore the issue.

3. What was the state voter turnout in this election?

More than 2 million voters went to the polls in the gubernatorial election. That was only 30.8 percent of eligible voters. Nationwide this mid-term election was the lowest voter turnout since the 1940s, according to the PBS News hour.

4. What are three ways to improve voter turnout in the future?

There are a variety of reasons that people don't vote: Some don't because they can't get the time off to get to the polls. Others because they are disabled or ill, some are out of town, some are barred from voting if they are convicted of a crime and others don't like the candidates, the issues or too busy.

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...Introduction
In what are perhaps the most volatile of dinnertime conversation topics, politics and elections take to the forefront of our daily lives in major fashion once every four years. This is of course when many Americans head to the polls to cast their votes for who they want to see in the oval office. Months, in fact almost a year, of campaigning culminates on that Tuesday evening in November as the fate of a nation is decided. However few people fully understand just how that election process works. We have all heard of the electoral college but few of us fully understand it or its impact on our democratic process. This election process divides our nation into two parties and directly impacts everything from campaigning to voterturnout and can even affect the outcome of the election altogether.
How The Electoral College Came To Be
The process by which we elect our executive branch has been the same since the Constitution was ratified in 1787. Article II, Section I of the Constitution sets the framework for how a president is elected, or rather selected. As the Constitution states “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature...